Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Ming Tsai and his Mom made bings one day on his PBS show and they looked awesome. Ming made cheeseburgers with the works and totally encased them in bing dough. Yummy!

Here in southern California we are fortunate enough to have Jarritos brand soda, we love tamarindo, mandarina, pina (pineapple), toronja (grapefruit), fruit punch and my own personal favorite - mango. Delicious and always in bottles and in my opinion, soda tastes better from a bottle.

We also have a wonderful store in Los Angeles called Galco's Soda Pop stop. They carry EVERYTHING in soda. For instance, they have 46 kinds of root beer, alone. Brands that you didn't even know were being made anymore. Website is galcos.com and it's fun to visit.

Anything by MFK Fisher.

Thank you, heartofglass, for the link to 80s stuff. Wow! And they actually have "cereal finder" link and an alphabetic list of which cereals are still available. Sadly, my own personal favorite, Kellogg's Concentrate, seems no long available. Perhaps that was because you could eat the entire tiny box of Concentrate at one sitting rather than the recommended serving size. We loved that stuff, though.

As a native socal resident, loved your reviews. We do have serious great eats here, despite some easterners comments to the contrary. My thought about the Dodger Dogs: it is part of the Dodger game experience - I personally would not eat one anywhere but at Dodger Stadium, but NEED one when I'm at a Dodger game. Go figure.

Hi, and welcome to the food website where you will have the most fun playing with your food since you were a kid. Go to kitchen-parade.com and follow the link to "A Veggie Venture." Wonderful recipes and a terrific blog. Lots of new and interesting ways to do veggies (my daughter is a vegan and I am always in search of surprises for her).

Sandy D.

Brooke29 has the greatest idea: I shop at hispanic markets and there are many of them here on California's central coast. Incredible produce & meat specials (at the ones I use). Also, and again, if you are lucky enough to live in an agricultural area, farm stands. There are many, many of them here also. I shopped two days ago at one of my favorite roadside farm stands and found bell peppers (red & yellow) at 3 for a buck, lettuce at 69 cents each (iceberg, leaf, romaine, red leaf, etc. - all 69 cents each). Even though it is January, they had hydroponic Roma tomatoes for 99 cents a pound. So much more "stuff" and all excellent fresh pesticide-free goodies.

I would bet that nobody remembers Kellogg's Concentrate cereal. We loved it. It was supposedly healthy, but the problem was that the portion size was very tiny, so you ended up eating four servings just to get a "regular" bowl of cereal. My adult children still talk about Concentrate.

I was raised by my dear Nana, and she was from the deep south. My grandfather was Yugoslavian (and my other grandmother was Hungarian). Nana was a wonderful and adventurous cook with lots of traditional southern food - fried chicken, greens of every kind, fried green tomatoes, great mac and cheese, the absolute best spare ribs I've ever eaten, chicken fried steak (frying was done in a huge cast iron skillet that must have been a zillion years old and every meal was accompanied by either biscuits or cornbread, and usually a white cream gravy). She branched out into Serbian dishes and I remember a wonderful bean soup with kielbasa and something she called "Serbian Ravioli." Also something I remember she called "shevacheechi" or something like that, which was ground meat shaped into small rolls. I LOVED that dish. There was stuffed cabbage and stuffed peppers, and lots of sauerkraut dishes. Boy, what great memories! Thank you for this topic.